If you want to accessing the Aurelia viewModel from the browser console, note that there's a difference between the element hosting the Aurelia app itself, and an element hosting an Aurelia component. If the app is hosted on the body element (<body aurelia-app="main">) you can use;

In OO-style development, the value null causes endless issues. In FP-style development null is a much smaller problem, because using null isn't ideomatic style. In FP, instead of using null to indicate absence, lists tend to be empty, and optional values tend to use Option (a.k.a Maybe) types.

In one of our C# codebases, which is predominantly OO, using FP-style list processing often runs into the null problem.